With the advent of 900 number and similar shared-revenue systems, the use of telephone-based services and the corresponding number of providers of these services has increased dramatically. Consumers can now use the telephone to receive a wide variety of services, ranging from technical support to personal psychic readings. These services are typically provided by a content provider who first delivers the service over the telephone and subsequently bills the caller. The caller typically is identified by the phone number from which he is calling, with the subsequent bill then included as part of the caller's regular telephone bill. The content provider typically calculates the amount of the bill after the service has been delivered. This amount is forwarded to the telephone company, which both bills and collects from the caller. The telephone company typically deducts a portion of the total bill in return for both the cost of making the telephone connection and for the telephone company's role as bill collector.
This system has significant drawbacks. For example, since the caller is charged after he has consumed the service, there is a significant risk of bad debt. Callers may refuse to pay for the service or may even deny having used the service in the first place. This often results in a loss to the content provider and also requires the telephone company to charge a higher rate for the telephone connection since a fraction of the connections will be written off as bad debt. Another disadvantage is that calls from public access phones, such as those in airports and hotels, are typically blocked since it is unclear who should be billed for calls from these phones. Many companies also block calls from their internal phones to prevent employees from, among other reasons, generating large bills. Another disadvantage is that callers from home cannot access a service anonymously since telephone billing statements normally identify both the content provider called and the amount charged.
In an effort to overcome some of these disadvantages, some content providers have established 900 number debit cards in which the caller prepays for the service provided by the content provider. For example, a 900 number debit card was offered by the Weather Channel. In this system, the caller set up an account by purchasing the debit card, effectively prepaying for Weather Channel access/information. The caller then dialed the access number on the back of the debit card to access the Weather Channel, with the appropriate fee being deducted from the value remaining in the caller's prepaid account. However, the Weather Channel debit card could only complete calls to the Weather Channel; services from other content providers were not available through the Weather Channel debit card. This single service limitation severely limits the functionality of a debit card, as a caller would have to carry a separate card and maintain a separate prepaid account for each content provider he intends to access.
At the other extreme, many vendors sell prepaid calling cards for telephone calls at a fixed or standard rate. Such cards may allow, for example, the caller to call anywhere in the U.S. at any time for 16 cents/minute, with a correspondingly higher rate for foreign calls. Although such prepaid cards have no called-number restrictions, they are oriented toward pure telephony, rather than content access. That is, every call made is charged at the same rate regardless of the number being called, and this rate is set by the prepaid card provider rather than by the number being called. Telephony systems of the type maintaining prepaid accounts at a central computer are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,706,275, 5,359,642 and 5,469,497.
Thus, there is a need for systems and methods which allow a caller to access different content providers, each having a particular rate different from the standard rate for telephone connectivity, while simultaneously reducing the instances of bad debt, increasing the access from public and other normally blocked telephone lines, allowing the caller to anonymously access a service, and/or reducing the high cost of telephone connections for such services.